There’s a running joke at our agency about the famed industry “ecosystem slide.” You know what I’m talking about - that one presentation slide that attempts to visualize how every single consumer touchpoint plays a unique role, yet connects with every other touchpoint to form a cohesive customer experience. Maybe it’s a Venn diagram. Maybe it’s a table. Or, my personal nightmare, the “Beautiful Mind” approach– a bunch of floating platform icons with a web of lines connecting them all in one tangled ball of confusion. “Look!” we say. “This is your brand ecosystem! See how beautifully and simply it depicts the total customer experience?” “OK, John Nash,” our clients say, before dropping it into a desktop folder to gather digital dust.
As marketers, it’s important to consider ecosystems, journeys, and the end-to-end customer experience. But these concepts can be hard to truly grasp when talking about them in the abstract, or out of the context of how an individual person experiences a brand and its products.
The reality is that in the digital age, our avenues of information are so diverse, our digital and physical spaces so entwined, that a customer journey is no longer linear or simple. At any given stage in the marketing funnel, a person might bounce around from Instagram, to billboard, to blog post, to text exchange and back in mere minutes. Even when this journey is simplified and beautifully designed to look at in aggregate, there’s a lack of realness to it– and a lack of true comprehension.
So how do we start to truly understand what the modern customer experience looks like without making our heads explode? Let’s get out of the abstract.
The AMP Strategy team is on a quest to humanize the total customer experience. Over the next several months, we’ll be doing first-person deep dives into the experience of shopping, purchasing, and returning across industries. We’ll map out real paths to purchase, identifying pain points and emotions along the way, to surface real industry insights and areas of opportunity– and share them right here on AMP’s blog.
Because at the end of the day consumers are human, and we need to understand them as humans. The true customer experience cannot be captured on a slide.
- Greer Pearce, VP of Strategy
Meet Our Humans
Greer Pearce, VP of Strategy
Outdoorswoman, jazz singer, tween culture obsessive
Ben Seldin, Strategy Director
Nike addict, political junkie, wanna-be foodie.
Elle Elderd, Associate Strategist
Savory over sweet, mixer of drinks and vinyls, runs on espresso
Jen Herbert, Senior Strategist
Literary fiction addict, almond croissant enthusiast, frequently-disappointed Chicago Bears fan
DJ Weidner, Strategy Director
Backyard grilling fanatic, year-round iced latte connoisseur, occasional salmon and halibut fisherman
James Herrera, Director, Experience Strategy
Life-long LA Dodgers fan, believer in the beginner’s mind, finds reading science non-fiction oddly satisfying
